ArticleFrontiers in psychology2018
Reduced Syntactic Processing Efficiency in Older Adults During Sentence Comprehension.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Syntactic Processing in the Aging Brain: Neural Reorganization, Cognitive Scaffolding, and Implications for Language Resilience.Brain sciences · 2026Review
- The Temporal Dynamics of the Labeling Algorithm During Natural Language Comprehension: Neural Evidence for Phrase Grammatical Type Generation.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Temporoparietal brain structures support sentence processing across the adult lifespan.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Brain vital signs as a quantitative measure of cognition: Methodological implementation in a care home environment.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Automated Measures of Syntactic Complexity in Natural Speech Production: Older and Younger Adults as a Case Study.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2024Article
- Speech comprehension in noisy environments: Evidence from the predictability effects on the N400 and LPC.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Semantic and Syntactic Processing During Comprehension: ERP Evidence From Chinese QING Structure.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
- Semantic Processing in Healthy Aging and Alzheimer's Disease: A Systematic Review of the N400 Differences.Brain sciences · 2020Review
- Article
- The Effect of Distance on Sentence Processing by Older Adults.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Researchers have frequently reported an age-related decline in semantic processing during sentence comprehension. However, it remains unclear whether syntactic processing also declines or whether it remains constant as people age. In the present study, 26 younger adults and 20 older adults were recruited and matched in terms of working memory, general intelligence, verbal intelligence and fluency. They were then asked to make semantic acceptability judgments while completing a Chinese sentence reading task. The behavioral results revealed that the older adults had significantly lower accuracy on measures of semantic and syntactic processing compared to younger adults. Event-related potential (ERP) results showed that during semantic processing, older adults had a significantly reduced amplitude and delayed peak latency of the N400 compared to the younger adults. During syntactic processing, older adults also showed delayed peak latency of the P600 relative to younger adults. Moreover, while P600 amplitude was comparable between the two age groups, larger P600 amplitude was associated with worse performance only in the older adults. Together, the behavioral and ERP data suggest that there is an age-related decline in both semantic and syntactic processing, with a trend toward lower efficiency in syntactic ability.
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